


someone in the white matter

by attheborder



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Come Inflation, Creative Use Of Bones, Dehumanization, Drugged Sex, Dubious Consent, Gangbang, George Hodgson Does Not Fuck, God Complex, M/M, Mutilation, POV Third Person Omniscient, Ritual Sex, Weird Cult Shit, directed by bryan fuller music by brian reitzell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:36:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25302451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/attheborder/pseuds/attheborder
Summary: Tozer knew a man had a soul; and he knew with the same confidence that the thing that had once been Hickey had one no longer. Indeed, Hickey’s soul was inside each of them now: it had been far too big for his slight, delicate body all along, and they’d had to do their part to relieve him of it.
Relationships: Cornelius Hickey/Others, Cornelius Hickey/Sgt Solomon Tozer, Thomas Armitage/Sgt Solomon Tozer
Comments: 14
Kudos: 36





	someone in the white matter

> _Ah, you destroyer,  
> _ _who yourself have not been destroyed,  
> _ _you traitor,  
> _ _whom none has betrayed!_
> 
> _When you have ceased to destroy,  
> _ _you will be destroyed;  
> _ _and when you have finished betraying,  
> _ _they will betray you._
> 
> _Isaiah 33:1_

  
  


They had made a special place for him; transformed what had been once his command tent into a temple. His arms, lashed by the wrists on either side, were stretched up and held as he dozed. Thus half-crucified, his bare chest and the mess of scars upon it were exposed to the chilly air of the shrine; around his neck, a blackened lump of flesh hung on a length of braided twine.

Billy Gibson’s bones, cleaned and dried, formed small cairns about him in patterns that shifted day by day, in accordance with messages received by Hodgson from the sun and the wind. He would stand in the early mornings out beyond the edges of their encampment, letting his brittle hair, now grown unruly and long, blow like wheat in the breeze. 

Then he would come back with new instructions, delivered in that soft and hypnotic voice, which the men followed to the letter, making new shapes, careful all the while not to brush even a finger against the stretched limp form nearby. This prohibition had been made very clear. It ought not to even know one was there; it was not to be disturbed, not until the prescribed time. 

But Hickey could always smell the men coming, which was useful: a rank and diseased mass, on the whole, but shot through more and more these days with hopeful streaks of prideful health. 

Blinded and bound as he was he had no better means of ascertaining the time of day other than the smell: sunrise smelled of stone and light, the still and mundane afternoons faintly of canvas and metal. And now they came, at eveningtime or something resembling it, with the scent of devotion preceding them, sweaty and cloying. 

The ropes at his arms were slackened, lowering him until he was held at an angle; the chains on his ankles were meanwhile tightened, tugging his legs apart.

Then the blindfold was lifted from Hickey’s face by reverent hands, and Solomon Tozer looked into the eyes of his god.

“Right, everyone down, eyes closed,” he ordered, not breaking his gaze, for it was important that someone was looking at all times, else be taken by surprise by a change in form, shape, or nature. 

For worship is a tricky business: one wrong step and they would surely all be struck down. None of them had any misapprehensions as to the power of the thing they had tethered here; Pilkington had nightmares, waking screaming of sharp-clawed, fractal-antlered forms rising from that place within which it was contained, and Golding, as much for himself as the shuddering Marine, would gather Pilkington into his arms until he calmed enough to sleep again. 

The thing himself could feel it, this thick, heavy fear of him: gratifyingly present in each and every one of these men, the men he’d chosen with his own hands, back when he’d still had use of them. 

In his peripheral vision, he noted the readiness of his acolytes. In the seated semi-circle behind Tozer, Tommy Armitage was taking deep breaths, hands clutching at the worn fabric of his trousers. On his other side Manson rocked back and forth, humming to himself, a dreamy smile flickering across his countenance as he thought, _soon, soon, yes, so soon, it’ll be my turn soon, very soon._

“Dr. Goodsir! Come in,” Tozer called.

Goodsir had been lingering outside, preparations at hand, mixed earlier in the day. He was calm and ready tonight; though the first time he’d been nauseated, they all had been. It had been chaos, it had been blood and semen and not a little vomit, desperate confusion as they fumbled through.

Hickey had screamed, he had, until with Billy’s sharpened rib one of them— nobody could recall who, afterwards— had cut out his tongue and then he was Hickey no longer, at least not to the men. Though inside his own head he still called himself that, despite the name bestowed on him by his believers.

In the filthy aftermath there had been a complicated near-silence; winded by apotheosis, Tozer had not been entirely sure any of them had survived. Meanwhile the reddened, scored god still retched and spat and strained against its makeshift bonds, trying to wrest back what it had lost, until at last it sighed and sagged, falling quiet.

And at that very moment Hoar was the first to rise: he was compelled to leave the tent, and climb the hill to the north of camp. 

Tozer had not believed him, when he returned, and told of what he’d seen— despite the muffled humming of divine truth behind Tozer’s eyes, he was not yet fully attuned to it— but caribou they were indeed, three of them, skinny and sickly but alive, and that’s how they’d known they had been right in doing it after all. The altar tent seemed to shine from within, a blackened, viscous unlight leaking out and coating the whole camp with soporific triumph, as they dragged their kills back to the camp.

Before they’d eaten their fill, Goodsir had the presence of mind to split the stomach of one of the animals, remembering how the contents of Lieutenant Irving’s had so succinctly foretold the consequences that were to come. 

So like a haruspex of old he’d dug through the entrails for portents, and his instincts had come good: inside he’d found a great deal of fungal matter, half-digested, and with a striking resemblance to specimens he’d examined of _Amanita muscaria,_ the fly agaric mushroom. 

The reliability of self-experimentation did not fail him then, and he’d found comfort in the slow variation of the dosage, the taking of careful notes, and most especially in the floating twilight state that overtook him when the perfect titration was reached. 

His head felt uncanny, hollowed and empty, for only a terrifying moment before it was filled anew not with his own flimsy, fatalistic thoughts but a warm and knowing voice which he recognized immediately. It called him kind and a good man, and this time he believed it easily. 

“Oh, how wonderful,” he’d said aloud, and laughed, and the voice had laughed with him. 

After that it was a simple matter of preparing and portioning the dosages, and presenting himself for duty when it arose. 

It was more orderly now, and he did not fear it, he did not shake as he had on his bedroll after that first gruesome night. They all knew well now that only proper observance could ensure that meat and medicine would not run out, that their route south stayed clear and that nothing hunted them as they did their hunting. 

Dr. Goodsir entered as bid, handed the bottle to Tozer, who drank, still unblinking as he then passed it along to Armitage behind him. It went around the seated semi-circle and each man, in turn, took a draught. Soon Hickey was watching Tozer’s pupils swell, and feeling the shift in atmosphere as the trance overtook the rest of the men.

Tozer wordlessly held out a hand; Goodsir handed him a second metal cup, this one filled with a thick white salve that had the same acrid, earthy scent as the tincture. Tozer gathered the salve onto his hand, the unctuous noises it made the only sound other than the breathing of the men behind him. 

Only when he’d plunged it in, without word or warning, did he at last break off his gaze. For with this deeper, more sacred contact he held all horrors in temporary abeyance. 

Tozer had strong fingers, calloused and trigger-trained; he speared Hickey on two right away, pushing insistently past his sore rim and deep inside, letting the cold salve seep into the tissues there. His mouth hung open slightly as he worked, focused, dedicated. Hickey noticed the sore on his cheek had finally healed completely.

Goodsir had excused himself, his job done; and Hodgson stood now in one corner and began to chant, an endless susurration in more languages than anyone had known he’d known, before: French, Greek, Latin, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic. Manson swayed to the rhythm, back and forth, only understanding the snatches of English he could catch: 

“Listen to what we ask of you … bring us food, bring us signs … consider this our sacrament … we enter your glory in humility …” 

Hickey had always told them where to go, what to do. Really, not much had changed. And it was all the much more beautiful now.

Des Voeux went first; he had a tendency to talk, to whisper things into the ear of his god: the most ridiculous things, confessions, pleas for absolution, nonsense about women he’d known and how this was better than any of them, more precious by far.

He was small but muscular, nervy and jumpy in his thrusts, and the inelegant drag of his cock inside Hickey would’ve been painful but for the buzzing effects of the agaric salve seeping into his blood. 

Now as Des Voeux fucked him desperately he gasped out: “... had my first fuck in the back of a hansom, I ever tell you that, and she was a rude girl and not a bit religious, was only after I spent right in her cunny did she decide to decry me for a sinner and a Godless man, and see if I’d known I was to be here, why I would’ve told her— _oh, fuck— god—”_ and Hickey never found out what Des Voeux would’ve told this bitch of his (though he was likely to pick the story back up next time), because he collapsed clumsily as he reached his crisis, hands hooked over the backs of Hickey’s uptied arms, as if to cling on like a parasite.

He’d hardly finished when Tozer pulled him out and back, leaving him sprawled unattractively on the dirty rug, panting, his cock softening in the folds of his undone flies. 

“Up and back, Des Voeux,” Tozer said with force, and as Des Voeux scrambled to obey, finding his seat again with weak, twitching limbs. “Manson, you’re next.” 

Tozer knew a man had a soul; and he knew with the same confidence that the thing that had once been Hickey had one no longer. Indeed, Hickey’s soul was inside each of them now: it had been far too big for his slight, delicate body all along, and they’d had to do their part to relieve him of it. 

Once, he’d dogged after Hickey, like a wretched red-coated retriever, but now his devotion took on a prouder form. More necessary than ever before; hieratic and ordained by a power finally come into its own. 

And that he could take a sharpened bone and scrape a line across his god’s chest to mark each man gone, drawing a holy gush on the diagonal, that this was his duty— it was right, it was good. Because it had been, after all, the sight of Hickey’s wounds that’d first gotten his own blood up, back at the beginning; those lashes, far too many of them, to give him the novel thought that perhaps the Captain was not the man he’d thought he was. 

Now that they were spoken to inside their own heads, now that that clever voice with its insistent logic did not require a mouth to issue from but did require this most humble and intimate of sacrifices to nourish— he was freer than he’d ever been, and grateful for it. 

Outside, Goodsir stared up at the sky and watched the summer sun linger insistently, with no regard for matters of etiquette, like a guest overstaying her welcome at a party. He wondered what form the altar would take when the true night began to come, and the snow, and the cold. Surely the answer would be provided before long. 

Meanwhile Manson was going slowly, as he always did, taking his time in the approach until he settled in a gentle, weighty embrace around the skin-and-bones deity that spoke to him as he walked and dreamed and did. 

Between his ears the voice, already vast and ever-present, now became loud as lightning and almost painful in its insistence with each thrust: it told him all the things he was to do, if he were to be kept safe, if he were to stay alive. 

“I’ll be good,” Manson sobbed, shoving his face into the sweaty crook of his god’s neck. “You’ll help me be good, won’t you. Please please pleasepleaseplease—” 

When at last he released with force he felt a great peace wash over him; he was part of his god and his god was part of him, the balance was intact, he remained in favor and would do anything to remain so. 

Hickey waited each time for it to grow unbearable; it never quite did. Sometimes during he was high up, looking down on the scene from above, watching each of his disciples approach in turn, feeling as if he were the size of the entire northern sky. Other times he was reduced to the small, mundane sensation of his own need, the pathetic leaking of his untouched prick, as man after man took their turn without ever so much as giving him a tug. But then he’d always had stamina, always been able to go without, when he had to.

And after all was he not “full of grace,” as Hodgson chanted? Was he not “chosen and consecrated?”

He wasn’t in the business of lying to himself: this had not precisely been how he’d pictured it happening, when the universe finally coughed up for him the destiny he’d been promised. However the fact remained that he was, indeed, righteously venerated, exalted and arisen, with all the attendant powers and privileges. This could not be denied. 

The numinous density of the air inside the shrine grew and grew. When his turn came, Armitage fought his way forwards through a pea-soup fog of faith, feeling a gnawing jealousy at the ecstasies of his brothers in worship, and wondering, as he always did, if this would finally be the time. 

He could very nearly hear it, he told himself, as he slid himself inside, began to move with determination: it was close to the surface, he’d swear to it. At any moment the sacred sound would come rushing up and overwhelm him in a glorious flood. 

For all he desired was that voice. He could remember it all too well, wise and knowing, calling to him with conviction: _Private Armitage!_

But he heard only the lewd noises of his own thrusts, in and out of the slick leavings of the other men, against the drone of Hodgson’s invocations and the gust of the wind in the canvas of the tent. 

He had tried, once, to enter the shrine alone and seek guidance without the eyes of the other men on him, supplicate himself in private. If he could just— without Tozer there, yes, he knew it was wrong— but if he could touch and worship _alone,_ perhaps his god would use its power to unfurl that wretched thing at the side of his head, and he would finally hear like the others did _—_

He had been found out, spotted entering by Golding, and Tozer had dragged him out of the shrine by the arm and into his own tent and there he had offered forgiveness, in the form of kisses, bestowed with mercy, and a learned hand on Armitage’s prick. 

Once, this would have comforted Armitage. He’d dreamed of it often, those cold evenings aboard the ship, watching the Marines lounge in the fo’c’sle, drill up and down the decks, his eyes drawn inexorably towards that handsome sergeant and his broad shoulders— but all his thoughts were of the temple and its holy occupant, how best he could be in its favor, and even the pleasure of Tozer’s clement attentions could not soothe the absence in his barren head. 

So now he tried to last longer, tried to sink in deeper, make it better for his god, and Hickey had to watch his face twist up in a horrible mockery of pleasure when he finished, his cry more of a wretched sob than a shout of ecstasy— and was that anger, Hickey wondered, that flashed in his young eyes as he stepped away?

The rest went to him, one by one. Golding had already become overexcited watching, as he tended to when he wasn’t one of the first, and spilled inside Hickey after barely half a minute. Hoar, wiry and devout, went on and on and could have gone on for much longer, but Tozer barked an order and he spent with a spasm, then scrambled off immediately, back to his place.

Tozer was last; Tozer always went last. Hodgson’s voice took a higher tenor and his melody wavered faster, changing languages at a quicker clip as Tozer approached. 

The half-starved gut of his god was swollen with spending, and Tozer ran a solemn hand down its bloated curve as he positioned himself. “Look at you,” he said softly, almost too soft for the others to hear. “Holy, holy thing. A miracle. You’re our miracle, you know that? Our very own miracle. You saved us.” 

Below him Hickey shivered, squirmed. Tozer, his cock in hand, stroking himself to fullness, nodded, as if in response to a question, and Hickey wondered what he was hearing. 

“Take me,” Tozer said, fearfully, adoringly, “let me in,” and he of all of them was the only one to touch Hickey’s hair as he fucked him, brushing back the sweat-damp locks; the only one to run a firm palm slowly down Hickey’s protruding spine, saying “Take me, terror, terror, _terror—”_

By now Hickey was close to bursting, in more ways than one, could have come from just the brush of Tozer’s shirt against his prick, but he’d learned early on that if he did so, if he let his own crisis overtake him without regard or care for the needs of his devotees, that was an easy way to earn their displeasure. They would keen and moan and rend their garments and then, with nail and bone, rend Hickey too. It was not a pretty business, certainly not one he wished to endure.

So he put it off; focusing not on the thick, bruising heat of Tozer inside him but on Hodgson’s recitations, on the pain of his ruined chest, until Tozer came at last with intensity, shaking against him, filling him even further.

Tozer reached to the side and retrieved something, a white object that fit in his palm. It was made of one of Billy’s bones. Hickey had grown curious as to which one, specifically; likely Goodsir could give him the name but it wasn’t as if he was able to so much as ask. 

Only when Tozer had slid out, and replaced himself carefully with the polished knob of bone in order to seal in their offerings for the night, did he lower his head and finally fit his mouth over Hickey’s ignored prick. 

_Yes, Sol,_ echoed the voice in Tozer’s head, _I chose you, I can see I’ve chosen right._

Tozer hollowed his cheeks, pressed his tongue flat, sucked eagerly until he was drowning in it, swallowing as it came, the seed of his god, his lover, his terror. 

He leaned back on his heels, wiping his mouth, and then with the sedulous care he once spared solely for his uniform and rifle he readjusted the bonds: once more stretching the arms of his god up high, once more wrapping the blindfold carefully about its head. 

“That’s it,” he said aloud. “Done here.” 

And the men opened their eyes and rose, still woozy with worship, and stumbled out into the night. Only Tozer stayed behind, standing at attention as the temperature inside the tent dropped, slowly but inexorably, the earlier heat of bodies in motion fading into the fervid past. 

Tozer waited. Watched. Blood dripped slowly down Hickey’s chest from his newest wounds.

Eventually it got cold enough that Hickey could see his own breath, gusting in clouds before his face.

Tozer saw it too: it was at last his cue to nod— not quite a bow, not quite a salute— and leave Hickey alone in the shrine once more. 

Tomorrow the men would pack up and make for their next camp, in accordance with what had been gleaned. They would carry their terror on a wooden litter, its limbs bound and its lucid eyes covered carefully, and it would direct them onwards, through personal omen and whisper and cry.

As long as it lived, they would live; and even if it died, their worship would continue interrupted. Goodsir knew how to preserve flesh, after all. For wouldn’t it be a horrible thing, to have to go without faith, after finally finding it at last? 

***

**Author's Note:**

> clearly I just marathoned all 3 seasons of Hannibal. other than that I have no excuse. 
> 
> fic title is from ["In Birdsong" by Everything Everything.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcWwGBHa24g) the song, like this fic, was inspired by a fringe psychological theory from the 70s called [the Bicameral Mind.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_\(psychology\)) it states that human self-awareness is a relatively new phenomenon: as recently as 3,000 years ago, instead of making informed choices out of free will, all humans experienced "command hallucinations" issued from one side of the brain to the other, which were perceived as the voice of gods and obeyed without question. 
> 
> i'm on [tumblr](http://areyougonnabe.tumblr.com) and [twitter!](http://twitter.com/areyougonnabe)


End file.
